Client Profile
The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), is an initiative of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Govt. of India. It seeks to provide effective healthcare to rural population throughout the country with special focus on 18 states, which have weak public health indicators and/or weak infrastructure. The latest programme of NRHM is to be implemented over a period of seven years (2005- 2012).

Business Situation
NRHM needed to conduct facility surveys of primary health institutions in various states of India. The main objective of the surveys was to assess the existing status of infrastructure, manpower, equipment, drugs, services and quality indicators in each of the healthcare facilities as per the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) norms so as to identify the gaps for future planning.

IndiQuest Solution
The IndiQuest team partnered with the Advent Healthcare Group for accomplishing this survey in the North Eastern state of Assam. The team was located onsite for three months, planning and executing the entire programme, which involved the following steps:

Setting up the Programme Management Office at Guwahati (capital of the State) and field office at Golaghat and Silchar

Recruitment of 122 enumerators from 23 districts

Designing of questionnaires; the IPHS format of the pro-forma / questionnaire has to be customised considerably to suite the local requirements

Comprehensive training and guidance provided to conduct the survey

Validation of completed survey forms by a team of experts based in the project and field offices to remove ambiguities and establish the correctness of the information. Approximately 1.7 million units of data were collected.

A data entry program was developed by IT experts and the data was digitised to create a structured database

Various reports were generated that provided the aggregates and percentages and also highlighted the gaps in the health institution facilities.

Benefit
The findings will be implemented by the NRHM to design the health policies for the state of Assam that meet the IPHS standards.